The Rudolf Steiner Archive

On the basis of the above considerations, the following can be said about the principles of education for humans:

It is assumed:

1. A higher spiritual world; in this lie forces that form structures which, in independent substance, represent living sensory experiences. And imprinted in these structures are the predispositions for the organs of life.

2. A lower spiritual world; in this lie the formative powers of the organs of life. The forces active in the first world form such structures that nourish themselves from the already internalized substance. The forces of this world themselves attach to them those that first internalize external matter. This results in a difference between the organs of life in terms of how they are produced and how they are nourished. The formations formed out of the first world are transformed into sense organs that nourish themselves from internalized matter. The formative forces of this world themselves add to these sense organs those that are in an interdependent relationship with external matter.

3. The astral world; in this lie the formative forces of the sense organs. But the life organs must also be transformed out of this world in such a way that they can receive the sense organs.

4. The physical world; in this world lie the sensory experiences of the human being.

It must now be recognized that these four worlds interact, that the forces of each higher world persist in the lower ones. The fact that the organs mentioned are derived from the forces of higher worlds can only mean that these organs are subject to the influences of the higher worlds, even if they occur in the lower worlds. From the physical world the forces of the higher worlds do not act on the sense organs; from the astral world the forces of the two spiritual worlds do not act on the life organs; and from the lower spiritual world the forces of the higher ones do not act on the endowments of the life organs characterized above. It follows that the forces of the higher worlds must show themselves active in a different way from the physical world than if they were to act directly from their own world. The forces of the higher spiritual world can only act as formative forces on the human being, who is endowed with sense organs, life organs and organ systems. They can determine the shape and position of the organs. Thus, the shape and position of the organs of the human body result from the activity of the higher spiritual world in the physical one. The I experiences concepts in conceptual perception; the sense of life, in its inverted form, produces the living concepts of the higher spiritual world. In the physical world, they can only function as formative forces. It is certainly clear that man owes his ability to perceive concepts to his upright form. No other creature on earth has the ability to perceive concepts, nor has any other the same upright form. (A little thought will show that in the case of animals that appear to have an upright form, this is due to something other than inner forces). In this way, one can see from bottom to top that which is connected to conceptual perception when the inverted sense of life is not involved. From this, one can conclude that there is a direction from top to bottom for the inverted sense of life. It would be even more correct to say that there is a direction almost from top to bottom. For one should see something in the direction of growth from bottom to top that is opposed to the reversed sense of touch. Insofar as the ego represents a contrast to the sense of touch, in the sense of the above explanations, one can regard the vertical direction of growth of the body upwards as an ego-bearer, like a continuous overcoming of the weight downwards, which of course represents a reversal of the sense of touch. From all this, the contrast between 'up-down' and 'down-up' in the human body can be interpreted as if a current from bottom to top takes place in such a way that the overcoming of the reversed sense of life from top to bottom is given in it. Now, the effect of the higher spiritual world on the physical human body must be seen in this reversed sense of life. Thus we can say that the human body, in so far as it is the carrier of the I, strives upwards; the physical human body, in so far as it shows in its form the effect of the higher spiritual world, from above downwards. In so far as the human being physically expresses the image of a being belonging to the higher spiritual world, one can see it as the meeting of the ego body with the physical body, arising from the interpenetration of two directions of force. In his ego experience, the human being belongs to the physical outer world, but at the same time he represents that which gives an image of the experience reflected back into itself. This is an image of what has been characterized as the self-contained sensory experiences of the higher spiritual world. In the body, insofar as it is the carrier of the ego, we can thus see an image of matter internalizing itself. Another contrast comes to light in 'backwards-forwards'; 'forwards-backwards'. The sense organs, together with the nerves belonging to them, now essentially represent organs that reveal their growth from front to back; if one imagines them, as is certainly justified, growing in such a way that their formative forces are opposed to the original direction of growth, coming from the lower spiritual world, then one may look for this latter direction in the direction from back to front. And then we shall be able to say that in the conclusion from behind in relation to the human form there is something analogous to that in the conclusion from below upwards in relation to the higher spiritual world. In the outer form, the forces of the lower spiritual world that cannot act on the human being from the physical world then worked from the front to the back on the organs of life; but from the back to the front, the forces of the lower spiritual world worked into the physical human world. They express what, in the sense of the above considerations, may be called the astral human being. Insofar as the astral human being shows itself in its bodily form, it strives from behind to the front just as the physical human body strives upwards. The third antithesis would be “right-left”; “left-right”. The symmetry of the human form in relation to this direction can be seen as an indication that the forces are balanced there. This can be seen when one observes the interaction in these directions of the human physical form, insofar as the physical organs have already been formed from the lower spiritual world, with the formative forces of the sense organs. In the left half of the body of the person facing forward, one would have to imagine the formative forces of the astral world for the sense organs, insofar as these forces no longer have a direct effect in the physical world, as from the left half of the body to the right; those forces of the astral world that have such an effect on the body that their effect is expressed in the body would then have to work to the left. Since these forces must act on organs that already come from the lower spiritual world, they will show an inward effect, as the forces of the higher and lower spiritual worlds show an outward effect in their formation. (What has been said here can be found substantiated in anthropology in the lines of the nerve tracts that cross in the organism.) This points to a permeation of the astral world with the etheric body of the human being, insofar as this is expressed in the physical form. It can be said:

1. The formation of the physical human body is conditioned by the direction from above to below from the higher spiritual world.

2. The shape of the human body, insofar as it is the carrier of the astral human being, points in the direction from back to front.

3. The shape of the human body, insofar as it is the carrier of the life processes, points both to the direction “right-left” and “left-right”.

4. The result of these formations would then be the actual physical human form. In order for this to come about, the formative forces indicated must permeate each other. Such interpenetration can only be conceived if the human being places himself in the physical world in such a way that the forces of the physical outer world in the direction of “right-left” and “left-right” are grasped by the forces of the astral world in such a way that the possibility remains open in their formation to then shape themselves further in the direction from back to front, and according to this determination, that from top to bottom remains open. For only if one imagines a direction that in principle goes from right to left and from left to right, acting on all sides, and then changes as in the direction towards the front, and is then transformed again upwards, can one imagine how the above comes about. But in order that this may result in the human form, for these forces, opposing forces must be thought of, proceeding from the physical world itself. These are then those forces which show themselves to be no longer acting from the physical world, but as forces coming from the higher worlds, as characterized above. But the latter alone may be sought in the physical human being. Man enters into relation with the others only as such a disposition. If we seek in the physical world the clue to man's relation to higher worlds, we must look not to the life processes and their connection with the organs, nor to the life of the sense organs, nor to the brain, but solely to the 'how', the form of the bodily shape and the organs. This 'how' shows that the clues to the spiritual worlds can still be perceived in the physical human being. (The difference between man and animal in relation to the higher worlds can therefore be seen from an observation of the bodily form, insofar as the animal is arranged in a different way in the spatial directions; but this different arrangement reveals that the higher worlds have a different effect on the animal and on man).

The anthroposophical considerations can be made fruitful if one applies the given considerations to the details of the human body shape. It will then everywhere result in full harmony with the anthropological observations. The indication of how in the organ of hearing, organ of sight, etc. conversions of organ systems that are in the process of developing or an inverted sense of smell in the organ of taste, can lead to ideas that must be found again in the organ forms. The asymmetrical organs are understood if we conceive of them in such a way that their forms have been formed by the fact that the “left-right” and “right-left” forces of the astral world could be excluded. If one recognizes, as has been done above, a reversal of the sense organs, a turning inwards of the same, then one will also be able to admit that the transformation can also be conditioned by other principles. Take the organ of hearing. The same has been related to the sense of balance. One can imagine that the activity that manifests itself in the sense of balance, an inward-facing organ system that has not yet differentiated into the organ of hearing, diverts it from its original direction of formation. The sense of sound would then come about if another activity were directed towards the corresponding organ system. This could be related to the experiences of the sense of self-movement. This would throw light on the fact that the organ of hearing finds expression in an organ turned towards the outer material, while the organ of speech cannot be perceived externally. The experience of the sense of self-movement corresponds to the inside of the body, while the experience of the sense of balance is expressed in relation to the outer spatial directions. One could therefore also call the speech organ a hearing organ held back inside the body. For the experience of the self, which does not correspond to any sensory experience, not a special organ, but only the upward striving of other organ systems, would come into consideration. Thus, in the speech organ and the organ of concepts, we can see structures whose physical form is determined by their tendency towards the experience of self. In what the body, as the carrier of the 'I', participates in from within, we can recognize the inversion in the formative forces, and say that when the body, as the carrier of the 'I', reshapes an organ, the nature of the formations of the higher spiritual world must be recognizable in its image. One such organ is the speech organ (the larynx). If the series of organs comprising the ear, sense of sound and sense of concept can be called a progressive bodily internalization of the sense potential, then the sense of sound can be recognized as reversed in the speech organ. Here the sound does not become a sense experience that strives inward through an organ toward the I, but is a sense content that is self-contained and creative, a truly reversed sense experience. The formation of the larynx corresponds exactly to these conditions. One can then also look for an organ that corresponds to an ability in man that stands between speaking and I, as grasping stands between hearing and I. Through this, something would have to arise from within man that is not as poor in content as the I-experience and does not yet flow directly into the outer world in its revelations. This would be the organ in the human brain that corresponds to the imagination. We will gradually learn to distinguish between the organ of concept and the organ of imagination in the brain.

Since the formative forces of the three higher worlds are to some extent still present in the form of the physical human body, it must also be recognized that the formative forces of the two higher spiritual worlds can act on the astral body directly from the astral world; and finally, that the life organs, as they are from the lower spiritual world, are directly influenced by the higher spiritual world. Taking into account such forces, the shape and position of the heart, the respiratory and circulatory organs, the muscular and skeletal systems, etc. can arise.

In the human form within the physical world, it is revealed that its development has not merely followed an adaptation to circumstances that are alien to the inner nature of the human being, but that this form ultimately expresses in image what the character of the “I” is. The human being's developmental disposition must be conceived in such a way that, in its formation, points of contact are given to the forces of the higher worlds. In the sense-perceptible world, only the content of sensations is given for perception, and the I, when it perceives itself, confronts these as pictorial sensations. Pictorial sensation, however, belongs to the astral world. In the I's experience of itself, the pictorial sensation thus stands, as it were, free in space. It has been shown that the sense of taste can be seen as an inverted sense of smell. If we do not think that the impact of the substance in the sense of smell is what causes the sensation, but rather that the experience of smell itself, as a self-experience in the I, becomes a component of the latter, then we can see in a desire or in a movement impulse of the astral I the response of this I to something that originates from the substance and is incorporated into the I without physical mediation. Behind the experience of smell, in addition to the experience of images, are the astral counter-effects against the desires and impulses of the ego. In the case of sound, it is possible to clearly distinguish between what is detached from the external object and what is perceived about this object through senses other than hearing. And what is detached is the experience of the self by the ego. We can certainly say that when an object is heard, only the sound-producing object belongs to a world in which the ego is not present, in which it cannot identify with the sensory experience. In the sense of one's own movement, the position and change in the shape of one's own organism is perceived. In this case, it seems obvious that, in addition to the self-experience of the ego, only an astral counter-effect to a movement impulse needs to be assumed. If there are only sense experiences in the physical world, then we can only speak of sense experiences in this world. But since a physical body must have sense organs in order to have sense experiences, there is nothing in this physical world for a human being but sense experiences and the perception of the self as an astral image experience. The ego has no other possibility than to experience objects of the external world, and to find the sense experiences combined in the most diverse ways. What happens is nothing but a free-floating in space of sense experiences. But let us assume that the human form as such is not meaningless, but that it depends on the direction and position of one organ in relation to another. And if we look at the physical world from this point of view, it is essential that the organ of taste is an upturned organ of smell. For if we now think of the experience of smell, as it is, as an image-sensation, without denying the substance itself, as space-filling, the ability to present this experience as an image-sensation, just as the ego-perception is in itself a freely floating image-sensation in space , then it must be recognized that something depends on whether the surface of an object is turned towards an object in such a way that, in order to receive the image sensation emanating from it, one sensory organ or the other must be turned towards it. For the human being in the physical world, however, it will only follow that, depending on the use of the organ, it perceives smell one time and taste the next. But if not only the ego perception in the physical world comprised the ego, but this ego were essentially based on the shape of its body in such a way that it experienced all visual impressions as its own, then in this ego the visual sensation of smell would be the ego's experience of itself on the one hand, and that of taste on the other. If we were dealing not with the finished physical form, but with one in the process of formation, there would be no perception of the self; the self-experience of the self would have to be quite different.

Automated Translation

1. Fichte's “Theory of Science”

Introduction.

I.

When a person's consciousness awakens, he finds himself transported into a world whose objects are given to him through perception. How and in what way we will see in a later investigation. But the human mind does not stop at the given; it goes further and wants to understand and grasp what is given. It strives for knowledge. So here we are dealing with two things: with a given, which is the first; but not satisfied with that, man still needs a second, knowledge. This is something sought after, something striven for. But one must not think that the sought-after thing is somehow known, because otherwise one would not seek it, but it is something completely unknown, something to be acquired, which one has never possessed. This striving of the human spirit characterizes its nature. The satisfaction that man seeks depends on the attainment of this striving. Open world and cultural history at any page, and you will find this striving for a certain goal on every page. Things are perceived and one strives to unravel their nature, one strives to recognize “what holds the world together at its core”. Look at the ancient Indians. The world was given to them, but they could not stop at that; they sought for another, one that was not given to them directly, but indirectly through the given. They came up with Brahma and all that is associated with him. We see, then, that the character of the striving of the human spirit consists in going beyond the given objects and fathoming their nature.

II.

Now knowledge is to be true knowledge, i.e., knowledge and cognition are to bear the character of validity, or in other words: knowledge is to convince. The question now is; how can knowledge convince, how can cognitions have validity? This question is not discussed in the individual sciences, because they deal with knowledge in so far as it is knowledge of objects, without examining the foundations of knowledge itself. Since none of the individual sciences can prove the latter by their means, there must be a separate science for this, a science in which the reasons for conviction are dealt with. We can call such a doctrine the science of knowledge itself or the theory of science. The first question is whether such a science is needed. Various facts indicate that it is. For one thing, ever since man began to think, this need has been felt. The fact that this need has always existed would be enough to make clear the necessity, first, that such a need is not feigned or contrived, and then, however, also that it requires satisfaction. A second fact is that there have indeed been people who have doubted the possibility of any knowledge. Now, first of all, we have to decide whether a science of science is possible, whether the above-mentioned need can be satisfied. But this possibility is a necessary postulate of human reason. If one denies the possibility of a theory of science, one can do nothing but fully embrace the skeptical point of view indicated above. Something must be certain because something is given, and it is only a matter of identifying what is actually certain. For if we assume the opposite and say that nothing is certain, then, if the proposition is to be universally valid, it must, by its very nature, be applicable to itself, i.e., it is not certain itself. It thus cancels itself out, but only insofar as it is valid itself; it is therefore a complete contradiction and we can do nothing with it. We must therefore admit both the possibility and the necessity of a philosophy of science as a postulate of reason. This establishes the task of knowledge in general and at the same time the task of the philosophy of science.

III.

Knowledge has the peculiarity of first having to arise and develop. This gives rise to various difficulties, especially when we consider that the knowledge of different people at different times is different, and when we further consider that world history gives us very different views of people in different eras, who at the time of their appearance always claim to be valid. What are we to do now? Are we to regard our present views as the only correct ones and all earlier ones as errors? Or are we to despair of the validity of our views altogether? It would be impossible to accept either of these; neither can ever stand the test of reason. The latter has already been dealt with above, the former leaves the question open: yes, if all previous views were wrong, why should ours be the right ones? There seems to be no other way out than to assume that all these views are valid. But then you have admitted at the same time that everything is right, there is no error. Now, the dubious nature of this assumption is strikingly obvious. Only one hypothesis remains, which can be formulated as follows: there is something true and valid about all these views, that is, the truth is capable of modification. So far, this is only presented as a hypothesis, and nothing is inferred from it.

IV.

Neither the views of the individual human being nor those of entire circles stand, when they occur one after the other, out of context; they develop from one another and are conditioned by one another. This can be observed always and everywhere. The individual ways of looking at things form levels, with each following one growing out of the one before. This close relationship between ways of looking at things allows us to surmise that they may all have something in common, which is only modified over time. It could well be that the core is unchanging, but that it takes on different forms, which are determined by the narrower or broader perspective of each individual or entire peoples, so that what changes is valid for an earlier perspective, but no longer for a later one. Indeed, experience shows that our assumption is a perfectly valid one. This is one side of the relationship between the views of different times, people and entire nations. We now move on to the presentation of a second.

V.

A view is only valid to the extent that it applies to a person, i.e., to the extent that it is formed by that person. Person is now something very specific, which cannot be any other, and whose specificity consists precisely in the fact that it forms its views in a certain way. It cannot form them this way today, that way tomorrow, not this way with this group of perceptions and that way with that, but it must form them in a way that is peculiar to it, and in this way they take on a very specific character; they are precisely views of the person and are subject to its laws of formation. What they become through these laws, that they are as views, and they cannot be anything else. These laws of formation thus imprint the stamp on them, they first make them what they are, and in this respect they are and must also be related. They are related because they have arisen in the same way. The business of the science of science is to explore this path, on which all views have arisen and are still arising. It is therefore clear from the outset that the science of science will have to take its starting point from the person. But we want to shed light on the matter from another side in order to gain insights into the source of the science of science.

VI.

Experience cannot be the source. After all, experience cannot determine for us what power of persuasion it has for us. All the means that the individual sciences apply are not sufficient to explain the least thing in the theory of science. It is supposed to prove the validity of the individual sciences, and yet one must not use that which one doubts to escape doubt. The theory of knowledge must therefore have a substantially different source than all other sciences. If we want to get to the bottom of this source, we have to ask ourselves what is actually needed to arrive at a realization.

This includes: 1. Apparently an object to be recognized; however, as we have already seen, we cannot start from this. 2. The act of recognition itself. But since the point is to examine what the foundations of the validity of truths are, we cannot start from the act of recognition, and so what remains is:

3. only the knower. In this, we must seek the foundations of knowledge, insofar as they are to be regarded as certain. The source of certainty and thus also of the science is the knowing person.

These words characterize the point of view adopted here. We do not consider it our task to deal with positive truths in the sense in which the individual sciences do so, but to show how such truths are possible, how they can arise and what significance they have.

Most philosophical systems have the fundamental flaw that they attempt to derive truths before they have even examined how truth itself arises, just as they attempt to determine what is good or beautiful before they have posed the question of how a good or a beautiful thing is. The theory of knowledge is not concerned with the “what” of knowledge; it deals only with the “how” of knowledge. All the individual sciences, except the theory of knowledge, have the peculiarity that they can only arise when the knower seemingly goes out of himself, when he seemingly disappears in the face of the objects; for the theory of knowledge, on the other hand, it is characteristic that the knower does not go out of himself. We see, then, that in the diversity of views, the own I of the cognizing personality forms a calm pole from which we must start.

I. Chapter.

VII. The Doctrine of the Person or the “I”—

Our striving must first go to the understanding of the essence of this I. Man says of himself: I think, I comprehend, I look at, I feel, I will, and so forth; in all this he refers to a certain point, which he calls his “I”. This ego is always one and the same, no matter how often it asserts itself: I think, I act, etc. We cannot even assume that a split occurs in the ego if the ego is to remain an ego. If we assume that the I that thinks is different from the one that wills, then we have to imagine the matter as follows: Let the first I that thinks be A, its action a, the second I that wills be 2, its action b. If b is to have any meaning at all for A, then it must also be something for A , i.e., it must be included in the laws of formation of A, e.g., in the manner £; and if a is to be something for B, then it must enter into its laws of formation, for example in the manner a. We can now visualize the whole process using the following scheme.

We see that for the one ego \(A\) that is to be distinct from B, the actions of \( \)B are significant only if they become its own actions. If we call the ego that is the subject of this discussion the pure ego, we arrive at the proposition: The pure ego is a unique entity. This ego is to be distinguished from the empirical ego, which we will discuss later. What is meant here is the qualitative and numerical identity of the I with itself, apart from all temporal conditions, which of course is out of the question here. It would be a duality of the I, for example, if I were to make the history of the ancient world according to completely different laws from those of the middle and modern times. This cannot be, but everything must be related to a common point, to a unified I. In all the diversity of views, cognitions, etc., the I is that focal point which it is impossible to grasp, since it always slips backwards when we want to focus on it.

VIII.

The I meant here is essentially different from the empirical or psychological I. The latter already presupposes the former. The psychological ego arises from the fact that I relate all my ideas to a common center, in which they intersect. This relatedness of the ideas to a common center is the psychological ego. But relatedness is preceded by the act of relating, and cannot take place without it. This psychological ego is therefore no longer the original pure ego, but an ego that has come into being through reflection, through the activity of the pure ego. The pure ego is neither this nor that in the strictest sense of the word. Its entire tangible essence is given by its activity; we cannot know what it is, only what it does. When Fichte said that the pure essence of the ego is the positing of itself, this is a very arbitrary statement, for the ego not only posits itself, but posits also something else, as Fichte himself would have to admit. But in all cases it is always active; its whole essence consists, therefore, in its activity, which can be expressed in the proposition: The ego is active. Everything that is not active like the ego would not be an ego. That one cannot know more about the ego than this can be seen from the following. What we indicated above, we can now express clearly. If the ego wants to know, it must include an object in its activity of knowing; in the above, it is now required that it include itself as this object. In order to recognize itself, it must rise to a higher level, but in order to recognize itself, it would have to descend a level, which is obviously impossible. However, nothing is more suitable for getting to the bottom of the most important thing than the above remark. It shows with complete clarity that the self is nothing other than what it makes of itself. Since we have seen that the ego is not something that can be experienced or recognized, it can only be that which it makes of itself. Without making itself into something, the ego is nothing at all; it is as good as non-existent. It is a mistake of some philosophical systems that they have not properly clarified this essence of the ego. Rather, they have presented the ego as something other than an ego, and they further assume that the ego is something other than what it makes of itself; whatever this other may be, it is not an ego. If the ego is to be a willing one, then it must make itself a willing one, and so with all its activity. Its “what” is its own product. One could figuratively say that the ego gives itself its character. Fichte came very close to what has been said, but he thought he could and had to specify a very specific what, a specific essence of the ego, which is neither necessary nor possible. Instead, as is done here, one can completely dispense with this what, only one must state that such a what of the ego must be produced by the ego itself.

To illustrate Fichte's train of thought, we can choose the following pictorial representation: Let \(A\) be the I, this is active and posits itself \( = A\), this is the What, and the action is represented by \(A = A\); the essence of \(A\) should consist precisely in the positing of \(A\). Our train of thought can be depicted as follows:

The ego is represented by \(A\), it is active in the modes \(\alpha\), \(\beta\), \(\gamma\),... and thereby always takes on a very specific character \(a\), \(b\), \(c\),...; which gives the overall character A. We now assert that if \(A\) and also \(a\), \(b\), \(c\), etc. are really to have a meaning for the ego, then the ego itself must make itself into \(a\), \(b\), \(c\), etc., respectively A, without deciding what \(a\), \(b\), \(c\), etc., \(A\) is.

IX.

It is very easy to get confused here if one does not strictly distinguish between philosophical reflection and common reflection. The philosopher seeks only to become aware of what both he and the non-philosopher do, just as the naturalist wants to explain only what he and the non-naturalist perceive. The philosopher does not do something different from the non-philosopher, but he is only aware of what both do, while the latter is not. But there is a very important difference between the natural scientist and the philosopher. While the former can only take possession of his objects indirectly, namely, as we shall later fully realize, by incorporating them into his activity, the philosopher is in a position to assert what he himself does, and since his cognitions are nothing other than those made by the ego, that makes them and is only now becoming aware that it makes them, he can claim that what he says must be so because he is the one who makes it so, whereas the naturalist can only say that what he asserts appears to him to be so, is so included in his activity. This is why the philosopher can be critical and dogmatic at the same time. A critical procedure is that which determines how something can be recognized. A dogmatic procedure is that which itself makes assertions. As soon as we have understood this, scientific theory as criticism immediately appears to us as an impossibility. For in order to say how knowledge is possible, one must oneself make dogmatic assertions. Now, these dogmatic assertions must not precede the investigation, but the investigation is impossible without them. Just as dogmatic philosophy fails because one asserts something that one must not assert, because it is perhaps impossible to assert such things, critical philosophy fails because it must itself be dogmatic. A purely critical philosophy is therefore just as impossible as a purely dogmatic one.

X.

If, then, philosophy can be neither critical nor dogmatic, only one thing is left possible if one does not want to fall back into skepticism, which has already been shown above to be completely absurd: a philosophy that is critical and dogmatic at the same time, and so it

with the philosophy of science; let us examine how this can be. In asserting that the self is nothing other than what it makes of itself, the philosophy of science is dogmatic, i.e., actually the self is dogmatic; in asserting that it is only that and cannot be anything other than what it makes of itself, it is critical. By seizing a principle and making it into what it can be, it is critical and dogmatic at the same time; it is the only middle way possible. True philosophy is thus the doctrine of science, i.e., critical dogmatic philosophy.

II. Chapter.

XI. The Doctrine of the “Not-I”. —

We have seen so far that everything we want to regard as belonging to the I must be designated as its activity. But activity as such is quite empty and without content; it must first take up a certain something within itself. The pure character of the ego would be that of activity, but this only comes to light in individual activities. However, an action that does nothing would be a “pure act,” a “mere ability,” a “dead force,” an action outside of action, an inaction. This reproach by no means applies to the activity of the ego that appears in empirical activities. But as soon as the activity of the ego comes to light, an alien element, one that is completely alien and opposed to the ego, seems to enter into it. The question now is: how can such an alien element enter into the ego? This seems completely incomprehensible and quite contrary to our above discussions. For when something alien enters, the ego is no longer what it is through itself, but through something else. Let us now consider this relationship in the case of imagining in the narrower sense. Every act of imagining involves two things: a cognizing subject and an object to be cognized. The first is the active one, the second the suffering one. By the one presenting, the other is presented. That an object is presented is the business of the subject, that an object is presented is the business of the object. If I am the presenter and I present a rose, then the presentation of the rose is my product, the presentation of the rose, on the other hand, is the product of the rose.

Let us choose another example. When I say, “I feel,” I am active, but I must feel something specific, I must have an object of my feeling. This object can never be given to me by the mere “I”. The question arises again and again: How can something completely alien enter into the activity of the ego.

Here only the ego itself can decide how to remedy the situation, and it is immediately clear that it is impossible for an alien element to enter the ego without the ego's intervention. It must therefore enter through the ego, it must be transformed by the ego into its own essence, so that the ego can remain what it makes itself. This happens in the determining. In the act of determining, these two completely opposed elements are united. Here, a precise distinction must be made: 1. the act of determining, 2. the determining elements. There are always two determining elements: an “I” and a “not-I”. The I is always the active element. We must distinguish here, above all, between two things. This is probably best made clear by means of a diagram.

Let us assume that the determining thing is the I, as the active determining thing. Let the external object be A; A is therefore a non-ego, it has come into being through determination, and through determination by the ego, in that it has come into being through the activity of the ego, and in its entirety as A, that is, it has come into being through determination by something other than the ego and apart from the ego, in that it has become A through the activity of the ego. Let us call the first kind of determination the active and the second the suffering, in order to have words for them. In fact, both kinds of determination are essentially different and must not be confused with each other.

Above, we spoke of another by which the ego is to determine itself, and this still requires discussion.

Chapters I-VIII missing

IX.

This clearly shows what attracted the poet and primarily occupied him.

When he set about his robbers in 1777, it may therefore have been the following factors that influenced him. 1. A degenerate time - the idea of something better, of freedom and natural morality, gave the piece its content. 2. His suffering, which he had to endure from society, gave the piece the character of the energetic. 3. His reading led him to endow everything with a certain Titanismus. For it is precisely the works of the Sturm und Drang period that are characterized by that last trait, by that Titanismus, which manifests itself in curses and imprecations. 4. Finally, something else influenced the character of his early works. That was his medical studies. Although it is certain that Schiller never achieved anything in law, if these assertions are also extended to his medical studies, then Schiller is very much wronged; he had even studied medicine very diligently. Indeed, he once made a firm resolution to study nothing but medicine for two years and to completely renounce poetry during that time.

Even if we didn't know that, Schiller's striving in relation to medicine is evident in his essay, which he defended upon his release from the Karlsschule in 1780: “On the Connection of Man's Animal Nature with His Spiritual Nature”. This essay had already been written by Schiller a year earlier under the title “Philosophy of Physiology”, but had been unfavorably assessed by one of his superiors at the time; however, in the end the same superior had to admit that “incidentally, the fiery execution of a completely new plan gives unmistakable proofs of the author's good and striking soul powers, and his all-searching spirit promises a truly enterprising [useful] scholar after the ended youthful fermentations.” The duke thought that in order to achieve the last expressed purpose, it would be good if Schiller would remain in the Karlsschule for another year.

After this somewhat longer excursion, the

[breaks off, missing manuscript part]

storm howls your names of the rejected.

A feverish urge to picture out precisely that which the sense of beauty strives to withdraw from view. But even more striking is the imperfect command of expression; almost everywhere where the poet [tries] to present the thought sensually to the eye, he lapses into bombast; his sensuality is confused by brooding, his thought by medical notions.

It is a well-known fact that the destructive urge, the discomfort in poetic feeling, occurs long before agreement with the world. And so our young poet is always looking for destruction first.

In one of his earliest poetic attempts, still from 1775, it says:

We hardly slip out of our casket
Into this great wide madhouse
We greet the sun with a howl,
We feel all the misery ahead.

His first poem to be printed dates back to 1776. It is a beautiful presentation of beautiful thoughts, but where do they lead us? They lead us to that moment when there is no more time, when there is no more thing.

In 1777, Schiller imitated his beloved Schubart, who had quarreled with the conquerors in The Eternal Jew, and also worked these down, which Schubart was not a little delighted about.

Hell had its triumphal song, and Schiller was able to put curses and gruesome words into the mouths of the devils, in which he was so strong. The despotic monarchs were also properly belittled.

But soon something else would follow this destructive urge; after all, great poetic genius never reveals itself in the mere art of destruction. The poetry of love follows. Not of individual love for any person, but of a philosophical principle that he called love. A principle that holds the universe together, worlds with worlds, hope with despair, virtue and vice.

With love's wings, the future rushes
into the arms of the past,
Long seeks the fleeing Saturnus
His bride - eternity.

In his essay “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”, he sought to enlighten himself theoretically through the theoretical presentation. The idea expressed in it is as follows. The poet either represents nature directly around him, in which case he is a naive poet, or he represents the opposition between nature and idea, in which case he is a sentimental poet. If he is more interested in nature, then he is a satirist, and either pathos-laden satire when he is critical, when he is serious; or, if he is cheerful, more in the realm of understanding than of will, then he is a jesting satirist. If the poet is more interested in the ideal, his poetry is elegiac. If he mourns the ideal, he is elegiac in the proper sense of the word; if he rejoices in the ideal, he is an idyllic poet. This is preceded by a philosophical consideration of the naive.

What is required of the naive is that nature should triumph over art, whether this happens against the knowledge and will of the person or with their full awareness. In the first case, it is the naive nature of surprise and amuses; in the second case, it is the naive nature of attitude and touches.

In an essay “On the Moral Utility of Aesthetic Customs,” he seeks to excuse himself for the earlier, too strongly expressed idea against aesthetic customs “in which taste, if not of genuine morality, is nevertheless beneficial to the legality of our behavior” - and these are [necessary] to consolidate the social classes.

In his treatise on the sublime, he suggests how man should behave in the sensual world without having to come into conflict with his morality.

XXVIII.

At the beginning of this epoch, Schiller had also been led to the study of antiquity. In fact, in his earlier years he had even wanted to learn Greek in order to be able to enjoy the art of this primitive people at the source, but Körner dissuaded him from this. The fruits of this work are translations – namely from the 2nd and 4th books of the Aeneid [and] Iphigenia in Aulis.

But it was also during this time that the artist created works that gave a poetic form to the thoughts expressed in his aesthetic writings.

In 1793, Schiller went to his homeland, where he stayed for several months.

He met Cotta and agreed with him on the magazine Die Horen – it was now the Horen that provided the opportunity for the iron alliance with Goethe. Humboldt had also become close friends with Schiller, and it was for this very reason that he had moved with his wife to Jena.

What Schiller sought in his aesthetic studies, he found in them, namely, where the bridge lies between the world of ideas and reality, in poetry. And to this he decided to return. —

His association with Goethe also contributed to this, and as early as 1795 Schiller wrote to Goethe, “the poet is the only true human being, and the best philosopher is only a caricature compared to him”. He saw Wilhelm Meister emerging before his eyes, and a decisive return to poetry followed. When he began Wallenstein in 1796, the publication of the Horen became a burden to him, and he gave it up in 1797. But he had already been concerned with the publication of a “Musenalmanach” in 1795 and had contacted the most important poets for this purpose. Schiller took charge of five volumes of it, but when he had completed Wallenstein in 1799, he also gave that up, seeing it as nothing more than a disruptive sideline. The Xenien by the two poets appeared in the Musenalmanach, along with Schiller's ballads, which surprised the world in 1797. In 1799, Schiller moved to Weimar to be closer to Goethe and the theater. In 1802, at the instigation of the Duke, he was ennobled by the Emperor.

Let us consider Schiller's shorter poems from the last period.

They were opened with the Reich der Schatten (The Empire of Shadows). This marked the beginning of a large series of poems that have been called philosophical poems. His philosophical research is also laid out in these poems.

But he also set down his historical research in a series of poems called the cultural-historical ones.

The latter include, for example, the walk. Here the poet skillfully manages to hide the fact that he starts from an idea. And we really see a whole series of magnificent landscape paintings in front of us. At the same time, however, we have also wandered through the course of humanity, initially in a united alliance with nature, then degraded by a false culture, and through a revolution, it restores its rights.

The Poem of the Four Ages of Man belongs here, and from there, quite nicely, a few others of Schiller's shorter poems. The third age takes us to the artificially formed Hellas, which is also the subject of the Greek gods. Similarly, only the Knights of St. John follow the Eleusinian Mysteries.

[beginning missing] the color fringes. Those who believe that Goethe did not understand or consider this objection should consider what he says in the History of the Theory of Colors, the author's confession, Hempel volume... p. 416ff. and they will be cured of their error. Goethe considered it very carefully, but found it insufficient. If, after emerging from the prism, the divergence of the light rays were the cause of the color appearance, then only the parallel running of the same can be the reason for their union into white before entering. Now allow the question of whether this divergence is not present in a more extended light source in the same way as in a less extended one. What should be the reason for the mixing of differently colored light rays if the only condition for their occurrence, the divergence, is maintained? There is no other way: if divergence were the cause of the color appearance, it could not disappear even though the divergence is not eliminated. There is no question that for those who are trapped in the Newtonian doctrine, for those who are unable to see that Goethe's views on color theory have uses quite other than interpreting this experiment, the same will always form a weighty objection. The reasons that are being asserted against Goethe here are still the most plausible ones. Incidentally, it should be noted that Newton, who thought of colors as material and their combination into white as a chemical compound, still had some semblance of justification for himself. After all, the combination behind the prism could well happen again when the light substances come together. A positive cause for this is probably not present, but one could imagine the chemical relationship of the substances to be so great that mere contact is enough to combine them.

But how the modern mechanical view, which regards light as propagating vibrations, conceives of this combination both in front of and behind the prism is absolutely incomprehensible. And in no work treating this subject – and the author of this essay dares to claim that he will refute every objection concerning this point in every single case – is an explanation of this union even attempted. [In the margin in pencil:] “Series of archetypal phenomena”.

So Goethe was right in his previous explanation.

While the empirical sciences seek to fathom and explain the context in the world of given objects and to explain the relationships between the individual empirical phenomena, philosophy sets out to explain the given in its entirety itself, to show how the finite, the limited, is connected to the infinite, the unlimited. For the empirical scientist, the world of phenomena is a foundation on which he thinks he stands firmly, but he does not venture to ask further questions about it. The philosopher, however, seeing the conditionality of this foundation, unhinges it in order to rebuild it and let it emerge from the only unchanging and absolute. What the human mind unconsciously created in an earlier period becomes its object in a later one. The inner becomes an outer for it and as such it is taken up and endowed with new life. Whenever the old is taken as an object and given new breath, then the human mind has reached a new level.

When minds inspired by old ideas are awakened and infuse new life into them, a new epoch in human history has begun. The longer ideas reproduce without the infusion of fresh life, the more rigid they become; they appear to be alive, but they are dead. This was the state of German culture in all its branches at the beginning of the last century. But then the time came when a new ray of sunshine warmed the frozen world and new life sprouted everywhere. In the realm of the beautiful there arose a Lessing, a Herder, a Goethe, a Schiller; in philosophy there was a Kant.

In 1746, the death of his father deprived him of the necessary funds to continue his university studies, and he was forced to leave the university. He left by publishing a treatise that already foreshadowed his ingenuity: “On the True Estimation of the Living Forces of Nature”.

Through the spirited [illegible word] Martin Knutzen, who introduced him to Newton, the studies on this great man were the immediate cause of the cited writing. Now he became a private tutor and remained in this position for nine years until he had sufficient material means to be able to pursue his career as an academic teacher. In 1755, he earned the degree of Magister with his treatise “A New Illumination of the First Principles of All Metaphysical Knowledge,” and at the same time he began his beneficial academic work as a private lecturer.

In the aforementioned treatise, he now presents himself to us fully as a philosopher. Although he still starts from the Leibniz-Wolffian direction, he is already standing completely independently, declaring the ontological proof of the existence of God to be fraudulent, showing the impossibility of assuming that a simple being could have the reason for its change within itself.

In 1762, he proves that the four syllogistic figures [two unreadable words] of contemporary philosophy are only false subtleties.

In 1763, he attempts to introduce negative quantities into world wisdom.

1764 he shows that if philosophy is to be more than a dead skeleton of the active and living world view, and correspond to reality, it must emulate the mathematical method, for this is the view that corresponds to reality [and is more true to life].

In 1766, in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, he regards old metaphysics as nothing more than a form of enthusiasm, which he equates with the musings of Swedenborg, who was well known at the time.

In 1768, he also broke with Leibniz's assumption that space is nothing but the relationship between things that are next to each other; he attributed to it an independent and original significance.

And so the dilapidated house of old metaphysics was demolished piece by piece, and David Hume's skeptical investigations had left a deep impression.

Not as fast as in his inner philosophical views, he progressed in his external career. He had to remain a private lecturer for 15 years. His circumstances were not brilliant; this is proved by the fact that the only coat was so worn out that his friends would have bought him a new one if he had agreed. He had been proposed for a full professorship since 1756. But the then seven-year war was an obstacle to his aspirations. Only in 1762 was he offered a full professorship in poetry.

Those who have had even a small amount of contact with Kantian intellectual products will hardly be surprised when they hear that the philosopher turned down a position in which he would have had the obligation to [illegible word] all possible daily phenomena in the field of poetry, to make occasional poems and the like. He was proposed for a position that was next to be filled. And so he was brought to the royal castle in 1766 as a sub-librarian with an annual salary of - 62 thalers.

Meanwhile, however, his seeds had also found more fertile soil here and there in the rest of Germany, and in November 1769 he was called to Erlangen and in January 1770 to Jena. Already determined to accept the latter appointment, in March 1770 the long-awaited opportunity arose for him to take up the post of full professor in his native Königsberg; he became a full professor of logic and metaphysics.

In August 1770, he then [emerged] with the treatise “On the Principles of the Sensual and the Intellectual World” and in this, the transformation had already taken place, the old dogmatic philosophy was concluded and the foundation for the critical one was laid. Here it is already clearly stated that the conditions under which things can appear to us cannot at the same time provide the conditions of the possibility of things in themselves. And now he sets to work on the most famous of all philosophical works, the work by which he made himself immortal, the “Critique of Pure Reason”.

In February 1772, he writes to Herz in Berlin, the man who, in defense of the aforementioned essay, replied that he hoped to finish his work in three months.

In Nov. 1776, he does not think he will be finished by Easter, and he believes he will have to work all summer long; the systematic development presents enormous difficulties.

In Aug. 1777, he hopes to be finished by winter, and in August of the following year, he speaks of a handbook of metaphysics that is to be published by him soon. However, it is not until 1781 that the work appears under the title “Critique of Pure Reason”.

This was

not a critique of books and systems, but [the] of reason in general, in view of all knowledge to which it may aspire independently of all experience, and thus the decision of the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics in general and the determination of both the sources and the scope and limits of the same, all from principles

given. Wormy dogmatism, together with destructive skepticism, was thrown overboard, mere groping under mere concepts abandoned, the whole world view placed on different feet. Until then, it had been assumed that

all our knowledge must conform to the objects; but all attempts to determine a priori something through concepts by which our knowledge would be expanded came to nothing under this assumption.

Kant tried

therefore tried to see whether we would not get better results in the tasks of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must be based on our knowledge, which [so] better agrees with the desired possibility [of] knowledge of the same a priori, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us. The situation here is similar to that of Copernicus's first thoughts, who, [after not much success in explaining the movements in the heavens when he assumed that the whole starry sky rotated around the observer, tried to see if he might not be more successful if he made the observer rotate and left the stars at rest. In metaphysics, we can now try a similar approach with regard to the perception of objects. If perception had to conform to the nature of objects, then I do not see how we can know anything about it a priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the nature of our faculty of perception, then I can well imagine this possibility.

[breaks off]

On the Possibility of Experience

Experience arises only through looking at and recognizing (that is, thinking in valid judgments - through understanding) what is given.

Everything that is ever to become the object of my thinking can only do so to the extent that it takes on those forms under which thinking is possible at all. Thus, anything that is not capable of taking on the forms of my thinking could not become the object of my experience at all. Therefore, everything that is ever to become experience must conform to the forms of my thinking.

These forms are therefore the conditions for all possible experience.

An object cannot simply be thought of as being, but must be in a certain way; being in general is substance, the way it is is its accident. Although both are strictly identical, strictly one and the same in reality, thinking separates them here and considers the thing insofar as it is and also insofar as it is somehow and then says that what is cannot perish or arise, only its accidents change. This is quite right, if only we do not think of a persisting thing in itself, because if an object ceases to exist in a certain way and begins to exist in a different way, I used to ascribe being to it and I still do so; it is therefore always being, that is, it persists in its being. To say that the existing ceases to exist is inconsistent and impossible precisely because it is inconsistent, for it means that the existing should not be at a time, which is roughly the same as saying that the beautiful should be ugly at a time.

[missing part of the manuscript]

The ego is absolute in its form, therefore it cannot be asked about an authority to use the above listed forms, it is simply capable of doing so.

But insofar as it applies the forms, it is absolute identity with itself and everything else is only through the absolute ego, and therefore also the imagined ego.

A genuine theory of science, which is supposed to be a science of the pursuit of truth, must start from the absolute ego and tie in with the sentence: The absolute ego sets (i.e. makes into an entity) a conceived ego (relatively consistent with itself) and a conceived non-ego (relatively different from the ego) and sets both through each other.

The explanation and complete exposition of these propositions is a matter for a general theory of science. However, for the purpose of this essay, this proposition is justified insofar as the ego would be conceived as absolute and at the same time a matter determined by a form. This has been critically established as a fact.

If I now repeat the critical result found here, it is presented in the following sentences:

1. There is an absolute form that confronts us in the ego.

2. There is a matter that confronts us as opposed to the absolute ego.

3. The I determines matter through its forms and forms from its totality formed matter - the absolutely unconditional - as idea.

4. Matter is given to us only by observation of experience and there is no other source of experience than this.

Depending on the diversity of forms in which matter appears, it appears either as truth, as beauty or as goodness. The true, the beautiful and the good therefore lie in forms and only in forms.

Notes 5511-5515, undated, c. 1883.

[First page missing] the “principle of the mechanism of nature, without which there can be no natural science at all”, as suggested by Kant, in organic natural science, while du Bois-Reymond's treatise culminates in the sentence: “it is the concept of mechanical causality that Goethe completely lacked.”

If we could be pleased about du Bois-Reymond's dismissive judgments about the esteem that Haeckel has for our great genius, then on the other hand we must admit that the path the latter takes is by no means the right one, simply because an understanding of Goethe's scientific endeavors is impossible in this way. What is most important for the latter is the ability to completely forget opposing views – even if they are one's own – and to immerse oneself objectively in the spirit of Goethe's scientific achievements, because only in this way is it possible to penetrate his way of thinking in a comprehensive and unbiased way. His great friend Schiller has admirably shown us the way to do this (see Schiller's correspondence with Goethe from 1794. Edition by Spemann $. 11-21). What most natural scientists of our time do, however, and what [here a manuscript page is missing] [mannigjfaltigkeit der Erscheinungswelt merely as a sensual side-by-side and after each other, cannot suffice for him. He seeks something higher, in which all diversity appears as unity, an ideal whole that permeates all forms of the sensory world as its expressions, its variously modified manifestations. He perceives this to be lacking in the scientific views of his time. He expresses this deficiency in Faust with the well-known words: “Whoever wants to understand and grasp what is alive — seeks first to expel the spirit — unfortunately only the spiritual bond is missing.” He seeks this spiritual bond, “that which holds the world together at its core”. His later research pursues this goal; but, to speak in his own words, he rose from “belief” to “vision”, from “intuition” to “comprehension”. He later says: (Hempel's edition B [volume] 33. p. 191) “The idea must prevail over the whole and draw the general picture in a genetic way.” And: “Therefore, here is a proposal for an anatomical type, for a general image, in which the shapes of all animals would be included in the possibility, and according to which one describes each animal in a certain order.” ... “From the general [idea of a type, it follows that no single animal can be set up as such a canon of comparison; no single one can be a model for the whole.”]

[a manuscript page is missing here]

The aim of thinking about nature is to find types. In the introduction to Metamorphosis of Plants (Hempel, vol. 33, p. 7), he calls the idea “something that is only held for a moment in experience.” The phrase “the idea is what remains in the phenomena” is often used. This has only a limited validity. It must be defined more closely. Nothing persists in the phenomenon as such; everything is changeable here. The senses know no permanence. “What is formed is immediately reformed” (Hempel, p. 7). The idea is characterized precisely by the fact that it is only held for a moment in the phenomenon. It “actually appears as such only to the mind” (Hempel, vol. 3, p. 5). Nevertheless, it is the object of science. Goethe's view of nature is a truly thinking, reasonable one. Concepts that cannot be thought of in any definite way, such as consanguinity, are alien to him.

The facts that modern natural philosophy presents to establish the doctrine of consanguinity can all be considered correct; indeed, one can go even further and say that one would admit everything that our naturalists assume could still be found to confirm their theory, and yet one must admit that the modern theory of descent is insufficient to explain all these facts, whereas the path taken by Goethe is the more perfect one. Let us delve deeper. What about the famous principle of inheritance? Does it provide a law, a concept? Absolutely not. It merely states the fact that a series of characteristics found in the parents can also be found in the offspring. This is not a law, merely an experience put into words. And does the principle of adaptation say anything? No more: That a series of character traits in a living being can be modified by external influences. Again, not a mental, legal definition. And what does consanguinity mean? That a series of different organisms have developed through procreation from ancestors. All this and more can be admitted by modern Darwinism. But Goethe's way of looking at things goes deeper. He seeks the organic laws of action. He is not satisfied with what our senses convey to us. He seeks that which is independent of space and time, which is determined in and by itself. He does not seek the relationships between two entities in their spatial-temporal relationships, but in the concrete, specific content of the two forms of existence, which can only be grasped through thought. He does not relate the individual organs of the plant in such a way that he traces the spatial emergence of one from the other, /breaks off]

But how does he then conceive of the relationship between the type and the individual form? The correct interpretation of that famous conversation with Schiller, in which he sketched out the concept of the Urpflanze for him on a piece of paper, helps us to answer this question. Schiller could only find an idea in this Urpflanze. He knew [breaks off]

Introduction. This is based on the fact that we consider the view of nature itself to be incomplete.

In science, no special attention is paid to the actual genius of nature. At most, it is admitted that the genius's gaze succeeds in spotting the combination of natural forces; but it is not considered decisive for the shaping of the world view that we seek in science. The influence of genius on science is therefore said to be only a historical one, not a factual one.

What distinguishes the epoch of education in which we live from others can be traced back to Goethe. He has given it its character. In him, German poetry of our century sees an ideal to strive for; with the eye gained from his writings, we look at antiquity; with the same eye, Germans have succeeded in unraveling Shakespeare's genius. All the radii of German intellectual life emanate from him. However, this magnificent image of the great genius is marred by a dark spot that stands in unsatisfactory disharmony with the brightness spreading over it. Goethe's unreserved admiration in all fields of the intellect is contrasted with the dubious position in which his scientific achievements are placed.

Today, we have come back from the absolute rejection of these achievements, which occurred during Goethe's lifetime and long after his death, and we still have a completely negative attitude towards the physical part of the color theory, but we still grant them some importance. But if we take a closer look at the verdict of modern science, we cannot deny that the recognition of Goethe's scientific achievements is based on completely different premises than his other achievements and is by no means on a par with them.

Those who go furthest in their appreciation of Goethe in a scientific sense admit that Goethe's view of nature is based on ideas that also underlie the modern science of organisms – the Darwin-Haeckelian theory of evolution. But no one can dispute that this modern science does not originate from Goethe's view at all. His influence on it is not noticeable. And if it has been claimed in recent times that modern developmental theory would have reached its present state even without Goethe, this cannot be denied. Thus, one cannot ascribe to his efforts the power that was necessary to elevate the ideas on which they were based to the level of scientific conviction.

This fact is attributed to the fact that Goethe, while conceiving the connections within the organic series of beings entirely in line with the theory of evolution, did not penetrate to the principles that make this kind of connection comprehensible to us. Goethe is said to have anticipated Darwin's world view without being able to provide an explanation of it at the same time. Without this explanation, the theory of evolution appears as an arbitrary hypothesis.

This is precisely where the difference in the appreciation of Goethe's scientific achievements and his other writings lies. Through the latter, he created a new epoch. But the former lack precisely that which would make them the starting point of a new epoch. For we must not deceive ourselves: a scientific world view without a principled foundation is without any kind of justification and is no more than a series of unfounded ideas. Such a view lacks the one characteristic that would make it convincing: inner perfection, self-contained.

One would think that with such a fundamental difference in the influence of Goethe's two directions on posterity (that of his artistic and that of his scientific achievements), the origin of the same should also be traced back to two very different dispositions of Goethe's mind.

The question arises as to why Goethe was able to achieve the highest level of perfection in one direction, while in the other he was forced to stop where he should have provided the supports for his scientific edifice. Why the highest level of perfection in one area, while in the other it is precisely that which is lacking, which is necessary for perfection? Otherwise, it is much more the task of the genius to state the principles, and it is then up to the lesser minds to draw the further conclusions.

It seems to us that these principles are by no means lacking in Goethe, that one has simply not yet found the way to arrive at them.

The main characteristic of all of Goethe's views can be traced back to the fact that he seeks everything that is supposed to determine our judgment about an object in the external world in the realm of the latter itself. He does not allow anything extraneous or borrowed from the outside into such a judgment.

We can follow this in his ethical, aesthetic and also in his scientific assessments of events or objects. In Truth and Poetry, he occasionally says, in an explanation of his inclination towards incognito: “It is not a matter of objects in so far as they are worthy of praise or blame, but in so far as they can occur.” A judgment about whether something is praiseworthy or blameworthy presupposes an ethical model according to which one values an object. But Goethe rejects such a model because it is not taken from the events themselves, but rather is brought in from the outside. His judgment seeks only that which lies within the events themselves and makes it possible for us to explain why they have come about as they have. In his works one can find innumerable proofs of this direction of his mind. It may be said that Goethe does not judge about the objects of the external world, but he regards them in such a way that they express the explanation that our scientific need demands. He judges in the objects.

Knowledge and Belief

Goethe's views on the organic can be traced back to this principle. He contradicts the same, both the view of the final causes, which at the time of Goethe still represented almost the whole world, as well as the assumption [regarding] that the living beings could be traced back to mechanical causes. The former view comes down to the fact that an organic being has such an organization that we cannot explain it according to mere physical laws; the components of the being are in a connection and interaction that they would never enter into if they merely obeyed the mechanical-physical forces that govern them. Since these forces are the only ones that are accessible to our knowledge, the structure of organisms can only be explained if we assume that an external principle builds them according to a premeditated plan, so that this structure becomes a purposeful one. In this doctrine, theology found a mainstay of religion, a proof of the existence of God, and Kant gave it philosophical sanction. It contradicted Goethe's fundamental principle because it resorted to something outside the organism to explain it. It had to demand that all the elements that help us to understand the organism be found within it. If living beings have some purposeful structure, then something must be found within them from which this structure follows. Goethe's response to Link, who seeks to explain organic natural phenomena in terms of teleological principles, is: “The author, a knowledgeable botanist, explains physiological phenomena in terms of teleological views that are not, and cannot be, ours.” On January 6, 1798, he wrote to Schiller: “You know how much I am attached to the purposiveness of organic nature inwardly.” But the mechanistic view of living beings was just as incompatible with his fundamental principles as the teleologic one. The reason is quite the same. This view, too, does not explain the organism in terms of laws that are peculiar to it, as it were, innate in it, but rather makes it appear to be dominated by forces that are effective in inorganic nature. He did not want to explain the organic from the inorganic, but from itself. Even in his youth, he rejected the idea that the whole universe could be traced back to mechanical laws, as he describes in Truth and Fiction in relation to the système de la nature. “The système de la nature was announced, and so we really hoped to learn something about nature, our idol.” He sees himself as disappointed. “A matter should be from eternity, and moved from eternity, and should now with this movement right and left and on all sides without further ado produce the infinite phenomena of existence. We would have been satisfied with all this if the author had really built the world before our eyes out of his moving matter. But he may know as little about nature as we do: for by putting up some general concepts, he immediately leaves them to transform that which appears higher than nature, or as higher nature in nature, into material, heavy, indeed moving, but still directionless and formless nature, and thereby believes he has gained a great deal.” The same is expressed in the following saying of Goethe: “The nearest comprehensible causes are comprehensible and for that very reason most comprehensible; which is why we like to think of ourselves as mechanical, which is of a higher kind.” - This is proof that Goethe found teleology and the mechanical world view to be equally insufficient to explain the organic.

He demanded that a true science of the organic should create the concept of the organic and the laws of life in the mind, just as Galileo once created the laws of mechanical nature. But that is the task of genius. In his theory of colors, Goethe emphasizes the importance of natural science to the genius, for whom “one case is worth a thousand,” and he admires Galileo for developing the theory of pendulums and the fall of bodies from swinging church lamps.

Every advance in science depends on our expanding our system of concepts, for in doing so we shed light in a realm of phenomena that is dark to us. Without Galileo's laws, we can observe the swinging motion of bodies, the motion of falling and throwing, for as long as we like, but we will not understand them. Merely describing the phenomena is not enough. It is essential that our mind is able to create a concept that makes an appearance understandable to us. But this requires creative power. It is the peculiarity of genius that from within it the conceptual does not emerge as a gray, content-free generalization - gray theory - but as one that is saturated and full of content, creating ideas that make the outside world comprehensible to our minds.

In our time, however, people fail to recognize the necessity of this creative power of genius for science. This is because they consider the latter to be nothing more than a reflection, a photograph of reality, to which faithfulness is the main requirement. The task of compiling such a “lifelike” image falls primarily to what is called “common sense.” In the face of such a view, the substantial ideas of genius naturally appear as a falsification of experience, as “conceptual poetry”.

For this view, genius has a very small role at all. At most, it can hasten the discovery of some natural law through a divinatory insight, it can find sooner what the history of science without it would have arrived at sooner or later, but that genius should also have any significance for the formulation of the content of a natural law is, according to this view, out of the question. In the face of this view, one is driven to ask: why have science at all if it is supposed to offer nothing more than a reflection of experience? Why not be satisfied with mere contemplation? The history of science, as well as science itself today, refutes this view. All progress in science is based on the creative power of the human mind. The laws of nature are not the object of direct experience; they are the creations of the human mind. Goethe belongs to the ranks of those who have truly conquered a field for science by creating new ideas. What he calls the type in the field of organic nature is to the latter what Galileo's mechanical principles are.

Only the consistent development of the fundamental view of the necessity of explaining every object of nature from its own self, as set forth above, led Goethe to this idea of the type. But his mission as a poet is also based on the same fundamental direction of his spirit. As a poet, he had the task of transforming immediate reality into poetry. This immediate reality as such no longer satisfies a certain higher need of man.

There is something about the way phenomena unfold that can no longer satisfy us. Chance plays a role and brings about constellations in reality that do not satisfy our reason. Goethe felt this more than anyone else. He often speaks of “wicked” chance, by which he means that some event takes an outcome that it would not take if only the necessity of reason were to prevail in the world. His mission in both poetry and science is to arrive at a satisfactory view of things that goes beyond what is directly experienced. “Real life often loses its luster to such an extent” (Poetry and Truth II, 9th book and Schröer's edition of the dramas $117), ”that it [sometimes] has to be refreshed with the varnish of fiction.” But in doing so, he never goes beyond what is given to man in poetry either, so that Merck could say of him that he seeks to give the real a poetic form, while others seek to realize the so-called poetic, the imaginative, which gives nothing but nonsense. We see that Goethe's whole mission actually consists in seeking the necessary, that which satisfies our minds, within reality itself. But his work in the field of inorganic nature is also based on the same disposition of his mind.

In the organism, we have a center that works from within the phenomena, and this is what we have to start with in order to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of them. In inorganic nature, however, there is no such central element; all effects can be traced back to external influences, spatial and temporal conditions, etc. It seems almost impossible to provide anything other than a mere photograph if one does not want to go beyond reality. And yet Goethe demands with all his energy that we also seek the principles for explaining phenomena within the given itself. “The highest would be to comprehend that all fact is already theory.” To get to know Goethe from this side, it is necessary, above all, to consider what Goethe the experiment is. A phenomenon of inorganic nature results from the interaction of the qualities that fill space and time, from the interaction of substances and forces.

The conditions for the progression of a phenomenon lie in the nature of the interacting objects and in the constellation in which they find themselves as a result of their location in space and time. This latter factor is now something that is added to the nature of the objects. Phenomena thus always contain a factor that prevents us from explaining them as a necessary consequence of the existing objects. According to Goethe, the experiment is to eliminate this factor of direct experience. The experiment is to bring the objects of the sensory world into such a mutual dependence that we are able to recognize a certain event as the necessary consequence of the existing objects. Everything that modifies the original mutual behavior of the objects is to be eliminated by the experiment. Goethe calls a phenomenon that comes about in this way a primal phenomenon. In mathematics, the primal phenomenon of physics corresponds to the axiom. The latter has no other function than to show us the relationships between simple spatial quantities in such a way that their connection is immediately comprehensible to us without further deduction. The entire mathematical system is nothing more than a complication of the axioms. Goethe wants to shape physics in an analogous way. It should be a system that arises through a complication of the archetypal phenomena and thus has an inner necessity in the way it is constructed. We find every phenomenon of experience in the system of science, not only in the random constellation in which it appears to us in the external world, but in a systematic whole from which it can be fully understood in its course. For Goethe, theory is nothing more than higher experience, but precisely higher experience, in which all details are connected as required by reason. “There is a delicate empiricism that makes itself intimately identical with the object and thereby becomes the actual theory” (Spr. in Prosa, N. 906).

Do we now ask whether Goethe's view of nature really lacks fundamental principles and whether it therefore proves to be incomplete, unfinished, in need of justification? The preceding pages show most decidedly that this is not the case. The foundations of Goethe's scientific views are the most definite that can be imagined, and they are identical with those that determine the whole direction of his work. His view is self-sustaining and did not have to await its justification from a later time. What it lacked was to apply the given points of view to all areas of the world of phenomena.

The reason why the self-justifying guarantee of Goethe's world view was denied is that so far no one has considered his scientific endeavors in the context of his entire being. But most of his assertions are not at all comprehensible without such a perspective, and it is easy to then attribute a false sense to them. If we now look from the Goethean view of nature to the modern one, of which he was a prophet, then we must indeed admit that his starting points were essentially different. The modern view of nature arose from the need to explain the entire universe in terms of mechanical causality. It was believed that the explanation of nature could only be made consistent if the laws that govern the inorganic could also be extended to the organic. We see that this view is based on a premise that Goethe rejected.

From this alone it is clear that the similarity of one of Goethe's assertions with one of the mechanical explanation of nature can only be an external one, and that it is absolutely necessary to go back to the most original axioms of Goethe if one wants to recognize the true meaning of his assertions. From this it also becomes clear how the misunderstanding we referred to above regarding the recognition of Goethe as a scientific thinker developed. There is a certain, and it must be admitted extensive, agreement between Goethe's view of nature and that of modern natural science; however, Goethe starts from completely different premises than the latter. But because these latter premises were not regarded as really scientific, because they were denied the power to found a view of nature, it was concluded that Goethe lacked the principles for his view of nature altogether, whereas in fact he lacked only those that dominate the mechanical explanation of the universe.

Goethe's view of nature is thus a self-contained whole, with its own foundations, and can only be understood in itself. By being lumped together with other theories, it is placed in an inadequate position.

But if one is to pass judgment on its influence on the shaping of science, then it must indeed be described as very slight, and it remains for the future to decide whether, through the power inherent in it, it will succeed to satisfy the scientific needs of humanity more than other explanations of nature, and whether it will thus one day be granted a more fruitful influence on the development of human thought than has been the case so far.

These lines vividly illustrate the profound contrast between Goethe's way of thinking and Kant's philosophy. With judgments like: Goethe was not receptive to philosophy and the like, it is not at all dismissed there. The correct thing is that an essentially different philosophy than the Kantian one was inherent in Goethe's way of thinking. Thus it happened that Goethe always misunderstood Kant's statements and when he thought he was speaking of Kantian philosophy, he had something completely different in mind than the latter. It was not his gift for poetry and not his common sense that prevented him, but only that his view of the world is exactly the opposite pole of Kant's.

In the Critique of Judgment, too, it is not Kant's own findings that attract the poet, but rather things that were essential to Goethe's thinking, but which, in the sense of Kantian philosophy, are either insignificant externalities or forced assumptions by Kant. The juxtaposition of aesthetic and teleological judgment in the Critique of Judgment is of the latter kind. What is the principle of all research in Goethe, indeed the principle of all intellectual activity: the inner sufficiency, the self-contained totality of the natural beings under consideration, Kant found it only in a [illegible word] human activity in the aesthetic production and contemplation of a work of art [and] the teleological observation of nature. And that only by breaking – as Hegel already noted – the strict framework of his philosophy and actually founding an aesthetics and teleology in an inconsistent way.

Goethe was not simply dismissive of Fichte. Those familiar with Fichte's philosophy must also admit that Fichte has far more points of contact with Goethe than with Kant. In the Annalen, Goethe is indignant about him:

He was one of the most capable personalities one had ever seen, and there was nothing wrong with his attitudes in a higher regard; but how could he have kept pace with the world that he regarded as his acquired property?

And what he, G., says in 1797 at the gate of the University of Jena: where “the interaction of talented people and fortunate circumstances would be worthy of the most faithful and vivid description,” he first mentions Fichte, who “gave a new presentation of the theory of science in the philosophical journal.” Also significant is what he wrote to Fichte on June 24, 1794, after Fichte had sent him the first sheets of the Theory of Science:

What has been sent contains nothing that I do not understand or at least believe I understand, nothing that does not readily connect with my usual way of thinking.

When Goethe's relationship to Schelling is discussed, it is only Schelling's first philosophical thesis that can be considered. As for the mystical period of Schelling's philosophy, there are neither historical points of contact nor, at least initially, any similarities. Schelling's natural philosophy does contain something of Goethe's way of thinking. The creative principle that Schelling posits as the basis of nature, which permeates all of nature as an active force, is also characteristic of Goethe. It is therefore clear that Goethe's ideas were clarified in his discussions with Schelling, that many of them took on a more definite form. But the German philosopher who understood Goethe best is likely to be Hegel. He not only regarded Goethe's scientific way of thinking as justified, but, if one disregards Hegel's peculiar mental disposition, which above all lacks cases in which everything develops according to the logical side, Hegel's philosophical way of thinking is likely to be closer to Goethe's than to that of any other German philosopher. The Humboldt brothers, especially Wilhelm von Humboldt, also had much in common with Goethean research in their way of thinking. We need only think of the words with which Goethe greeted Alexander von Humboldt's Physiognomy of Plants in 1806: “Now that Linnaeus has developed an alphabet of plant forms and left us a convenient-to-use directory; now that Jussieu has already organized the whole in a more natural way , and ingenious men with and without eyesight continue to define the distinguishing characteristics in great detail, and philosophy promises us a lively unity of a higher view: So here the man, to whom the plant forms distributed over the earth's surface are present in living groups and masses, is already hastening to take the last step and indicating how what has been individually recognized, seen, and observed can be appropriated by the mind in all its splendor and abundance, and how the woodpile that has been piled and smoking for so long can be brought to life by an aesthetic breath into a bright flame."

Goethe was, however, unable to come to terms with another of A. v. Humboldt's views, namely his volcanism. We will have more to say about this later. The extent to which Goethe's thinking was related to that of W. v. Humboldt can be seen from the fact that [text breaks off]

[First line indecipherable]

How does a truth approach a person who is based on the assumption that it does not contain the reasons for being, but merely reflects them? It must be assumed that the reason why it makes this or that assumption lies not within the conscious thinking, permeated by our self, but outside of it. Just as what a single thought represents lies outside of consciousness, so too the reason why we connect two or more thoughts in a certain way lies not within, but outside of our world of thought. The reason why we connect two concepts is not at the same time the reason why they belong together in reality. In this contemplation, thinking must therefore always bear in mind that it cannot produce truth from its own activity, but that it can only appropriate it as it is determined by something beyond it. Here, man does not produce truth by himself, but allows himself to be determined by circumstances beyond the scope of his ideas. In the truest sense, he receives truths determined by entities other than thoughts. For it is not the fact that thoughts are determined by entities outside our consciousness that is actually important, but rather that it is extra-mental entities, i.e., entities that cannot be reached by conscious thought, that determine the truth. This truth, which comes to man in a finished form, is in the proper sense that which can be called a dogma. This dogma can appear in two forms: either the ideal world itself comes to us as a finished product, with the claim that the reasons for its formation lie in an alien element; then we are dealing with the dogmatics of theology. Theological truths are dogmatic because they do not allow the reasons for being and the reasons for believing to coincide. Our insight into them is not one that we actively generate ourselves, but one that is imposed on us.

The second type of dogmatics is the dogmatics of [experience]. It is based on the principle that we can only gain our truths by observing the world as it is presented to our senses and by conceptualizing the things and phenomena it contains. This, then, is the obvious reason why we establish a truth. Not in the content of the thoughts that constitute it, but in the factors that determine the course of the phenomena that the thoughts merely depict. Here, too, the reason for believing is the fact that we [observe] a fact, not that which determines the actual relationship of the fact itself. The truth, as in the previous case, is determined, according to its content, not by the course of thought that we have penetrated, but by circumstances lying outside it; it is one that has been forced upon us. In every respect, observation is [analogous to] revelation as a source of knowledge in theology. In both cases, the truth is to be received as a finished product. In both cases, knowledge is actually a form of belief. Real knowledge can never arise from a truth taken from outside. Thus, two points of view of science that appear to be so opposed are in principle based on exactly the same premise. Both can also lead to the same consequences. Since they both see the ultimate foundation of existence as lying in the beyond, they lack the lucid clarity in the theoretical world view that characterized self-conscious thinking that relies only on itself. It loses itself in mysterious foreboding of an unknown; this is not without consequence for practical action, as we shall see in the last part of this essay. That self-conscious, self-reliant, intense thinking wants nothing to do with a moral behavior whose driving forces it would not find within itself. It recognizes only in itself the motives of its actions. The other thinking is characterized in a practical sense by a relationship of servility to the power of the great, sensed unknown. It finds its moral support not in itself but outside itself. The first thinking is characterized by a self-awareness appropriate to man; he has a noble pride in achieving his destiny through his own strength. The other is in its very essence determined by its humility and awareness of powerlessness in the face of the divine being. We will then see what consequences these determinations have for our view of human freedom.

Our view of the sources of our knowledge cannot fail to influence our practical actions. It is, after all, an equally incontrovertible and common truth that true wisdom always brings about a better attitude and that the knowledgeable and educated person is also morally superior to the ignorant and uncultured. It is true that one often hears the opposite view, that an ugly disposition can very well be combined with high insight and that the source of moral goodness can be present in the simplest, most uneducated nature as well as in the highly educated. But against the first it may be objected that not everything that is called by that name is real knowledge, and that there is an after-wisdom that is very little connected with man. This kind of knowledge is merely something that has been learned and acquired externally, not something that has been gained through one's own vigorous thinking. But what is acquired through the power of independent thinking becomes so deeply intertwined with our entire being, with the core of our inner self, we identify with it so completely that we cannot emancipate ourselves from it in any way. We do not merely possess such knowledge, but we ourselves are truly that which constitutes the content of this knowledge. When we act, we must put our very essence into the action to be accomplished. How else should we take the motives of the activity, from the source from which all our thinking and all our being flows. We must here fully agree with Riehl when he says of knowledge: “The deeper it sinks and the further it spreads, the more it is transformed into moral power; as such, knowledge becomes practical insight, understanding becomes wisdom. From the increase of insight follows the improvement of attitude, and so the system of knowledge is the prerequisite and support of ethics.” But the other objection, that a person with relatively little education can be morally superior, is also easily countered. After all, the actions of a particular person only extend to a particular sphere, to one area. Now, it is not a question of an unrestricted range of knowledge, but only of whether a person's knowledge extends as far as the range of his actions. He who has a narrow circle of activity also needs a narrow circle of knowledge. And so it may come about that a person with relatively limited knowledge behaves morally higher if he does not break his circle.

The doctrine of moral action will first have to start from the motives for moral behavior. These can be determined in two ways. And this determination is completely parallel to the determinations of the two theoretical worldviews determined at the beginning of our theory of knowledge.

These motives can be sought outside of our thinking or they can be seen as emerging from the content of thinking itself, which we have developed. Those who seek the sources of truth in the thinking of otherworldly entities and conditions will also seek the motives of morality in a beyond; they will perceive the precepts of their behavior as externally imposed commandments that they must obey. There is a moral imperative for such a view, to which one simply has to submit and which sets a certain standard for our actions. In this case, acting according to this standard is felt to be a duty. Kant's moral teaching is based on this point of view insofar as it is based on the categorical imperative. The moral dogma of theology also takes this view. This is simply imposed on us as God-given; we act according to it not because of our insight into its truth, but because of its divinity, which is guaranteed by revelation. It is not the moral force that prompts us to act and flows from the moral thoughts, but it is the compulsion, the feeling of necessity that they entail. But there is still another view that seems to be completely opposed to this point of view. It is the one that sees the impulses for action in the instincts of nature. Here man acts just as little as he would under divine commandments from implanted fundamental moral forces, but under the compulsion of mere natural law. He may not act out of necessity, but he does act out of physical necessity. It is the dogma of the efficacy of nature, which, in relation to moral value and in principle, is on the same level as the dogma of the first kind. The second world view presents a fundamentally different picture of moral action. It does not allow the precepts of morality to be determined by a power in the hereafter, but rather to arise from human thought itself. Just as in the first part, objective truth has essentially been incorporated into thought, so now everything that determines action is strictly contained within the human world of ideas. It is not the other, which we only imagine in the conceptual world, that determines our actions, but the content of our thoughts itself. Just as, in the theoretical, the content of the thoughts was the world ground itself, so here, in the moral, this content is at the same time what directly connects us morally. Just as in our actions we must see an execution of what an external power has prescribed to us, so too in our moral behavior we must see only an execution of what we prescribe to ourselves on the basis of our insight. This is different; here we are our own moral lawgiver. There, our practical behavior is essentially the fulfillment of duty; here, it is moral will. Now it is obvious that he who does not recognize any external norm of truth in theory must also reject such a norm in action. For there can only be one fundamental principle of the world, and if this enters into our thinking truly and substantially, it can only determine our actions from there. And that is the practical conclusion of our world view: it instructs man to have no other purpose than that which he gives himself. Only in this way, however, is a real will possible. A will is present only when the prescriber is at the same time the executor in action. If one being prescribes and another being executes this prescription, then the second is merely a machine in the hands of the former, and only in the latter, but not in the agent, can one speak of a true volition. Will consists essentially in the fact that it is linked to consciousness, that the agent follows his own insight, his own command. Such action must be protected from only two degenerations. Firstly, to see only the action of subjective arbitrariness in the execution of one's own commandments. But our world view could only take this point of view if it also assumed that the circumstances of thoughts are determined not by the content of thought, but by subjective arbitrariness, by pure chance. But for us, it is not the arbitrary subject that is the determining factor, but the content of thought itself. And the awareness that we ourselves are our own legislators does not arise from the fact that we decide according to our arbitrary mood, but from the fact that we are directly present in the legislative thought, that nothing is imposed on us, but everything is imbued by us. It is not a lowering of moral motives to us, but rather an uplifting of the human being to such a height that he makes thinking, which in itself determines its content, his own activity. We do not defend Schlegel's irony of subjectivity, which feels so exalted about its entire activity, which considers itself justified in destroying everything it does in the moment, but the view that thinking has a real [practical] content, and that man is able to elevate his spiritual self so high that this content no longer appears to him as something otherworldly and overpowering, but as his own content. We defend the point of view that it is the spiritual personality of man that provides the arena in which the source of the world develops and appears in its true form. While irony destroys any sacredness of the moral by reducing it to a whim, our view sanctifies the human personality by elevating it to the source of morality. Our view does not deny the existence of an absolute world substance in morality any more than it has denied it in theoretical knowledge. But it gives man a very peculiar relationship to this primal ground. Instead of assuming a principle that only directs the world from the outside, we take the view that this principle has poured itself out into the world of things with complete self-dissolution, with absolute self-renunciation. If the most widespread view is that things exist alongside their reason as its creatures, we assume that such a reason is nowhere to be found outside of things. We say outside of things. For in itself we see this reason as a real one. We do not take the standpoint of that atheism which simply rejects the reason of the world and simply considers the things - as they appear to our senses in observation - to be the universe; we base the world on an absolute cause, but we are convinced that this view has been completely absorbed into the world and that no independent existence has been retained in and for itself. And our practical-moral world view is the consequence of this assumption. There is no volition of the world principle except for human volition, because this principle has not reserved any resolutions for itself. It wills only insofar as man wills. It has renounced its own volition and has merged into humanity, and so its action is not one according to an external norm, but according to the determining factors of its own inner being. Through this complete absorption of the original source of things in the world, all the contradictions that occupied human thought for so long are suddenly eliminated. We will come back to this later. Here we must still note that history appears not as the result of the divine plan of the world, but as that of human ideals. History becomes the development of people's own ideals of will: What Herm. Ulrici, Im. H. Fichte, and others strove for, a union of a rational theism, as it is the need of the Western population, with a pantheistic world view, seems to be achieved in our scientific conviction.